{"id":124,"date":"2007-10-19T17:24:12","date_gmt":"2007-10-19T16:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/19\/joe-girardi\/"},"modified":"2007-10-19T17:26:42","modified_gmt":"2007-10-19T16:26:42","slug":"joe-girardi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/19\/joe-girardi\/","title":{"rendered":"Joe Girardi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chicago readers of the B.B.B. will recognize the name Joe Girardi<\/a> as the catcher for the Cubs<\/a> from 1989-1992 and 2000-2002. (Irish readers: I’m writing about professional baseball in the US.) I knew the name as a child, because he was born and raised in Peoria, Illinois. And his high school, Spalding, was my chosen high school (among the two Catholic high schools in Peoria, which consolidated my fresher<\/abbr> year, but let’s not get into all that).<\/p>\n

Furthermore, I was inculcated with a reverence for Joe Girardi by my grade school, Father Sweeney School<\/a>. While I attended Father Sweeney (1983-1988), the school was perpetually in financial straits, and the Girardi family was a patron of the school in some mysterious way that my naive mind could not grasp.<\/p>\n

It’s all the more remarkable that Joe Girardi was a kind of hero to us when you consider that he didn’t make it to the Show until April 1989, almost a year after<\/em> I graduated from Father Sweeney. After doing a little research for this post, I see that I may have heard his name for the first time when he was just 19 and playing for Northwestern.<\/p>\n

When he was big news for all of Peoria, during my high school years, the Father Sweeney alumni relished the notion that we’d known about him all along. That kind of pride is surely the most delightful feeling for a sports fan, and perhaps in the whole of life.<\/p>\n

The long-term result of all this is that I feel warm, fuzzy emotions whenever I hear about Joe Girardi — a man who certainly made good<\/a> on the Father Sweeney Weenies’ faith in him. I was especially glad to hear his voice during last year’s World Series. After that, his fate and the Cardinals’ are connected in my mind. And now he’s in the news again, according to the Daily News<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Joe Girardi was on the hot seat last night, and you could see him squirming. That’s the way it is when your name has surfaced as a possible successor to Joe Torre.
\n…
\nWell-embedded TV moles said Girardi made it clear to Fox execs that he was “extremely uncomfortable” about addressing the Yankees’ managerial situation.
\nDan Bell, a Fox Sports spokesman, declined to confirm nor deny what Girardi may have told Fox brass, but said: “We have too much respect for Joe Torre and Joe Girardi to enter into that kind of speculation. It’s a no-win situation for everybody involved, especially when the Yankees have not made a decision.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, Mr. Girardi, whatever you decide, I’ll wish you all the best. There’s no way I’m going to root for the Yankees, though. I just thought you might want to take that into account, and the people at Fox won’t let me leave a voicemail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chicago readers of the B.B.B. will recognize the name Joe Girardi as the catcher for the Cubs from 1989-1992 and 2000-2002. (Irish readers: I’m writing about professional baseball in the US.) I knew the name as a child, because he was born and raised in Peoria, Illinois. And his high school, Spalding, was my chosen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}